


Drive Me Home

by steadfastasthouart



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Lyft, M/M, Taxis, Uber
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-13 00:41:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4501176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/steadfastasthouart/pseuds/steadfastasthouart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>The driver leans over before Enjolras can open the back, and calls through the open passenger window, “You can sit in front if you want. Or back is okay too, if that's...” but Enjolras is already folding himself into the cramped passenger seat.</em>
</p><p>(Grantaire drives for an on-demand car service; Enjolras needs some rides.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Drive Me Home

**Author's Note:**

> CarTel is a fictional sibling of ride-on-demand companies like Uber and Lyft, which match car drivers with paying passengers via a cell-phone app. In many areas, rates surge during periods of high demand, so drivers, who drive their own cars and set their own availability, may prefer to work during peak hours. The app encourages drivers and passengers to rate one another after each ride.
> 
> Warnings for sex talk, violence, and bloody injuries.
> 
> * Many, many thanks to [rhien](http://archiveofourown.org/users/rhien/pseuds/rhien) for the incredibly-helpful beta readings and for so many marvelous ideas. *

**1**

The cars are usually way nicer than this. Enjolras feels like kind of an asshole for even thinking it, but come on. He's taken CarTel dozens of times since he signed up last month, and probably the crappiest car he's been in was a basic Civic no more than three or four years old. And they always sparkle, and the plush of the seats usually tickles when you brush your hand across it (if it's not leather), and they smell like citrus...

 _Asshole_ , he thinks again, and wrenches open the back door.

This car is definitely old—a Hyundai that was cheap when it was made and worth cents on the dollar now—but probably not as old as it looks. It's mostly a tarnished silver, but is liberally smeared with black smudges and dings, all beneath a veneer of dust and grime.

“Hey,” the driver says, craning his neck around in a way that manages to seem both curt and oddly gracious. Enjolras gets a vague impression of a grizzled, unshaven face and wild hair—not uncommon for the late-night drivers he's experienced, who are often many coffees deep in their commitment to catching the nightlife fares—before the man turns back around.

“Hello,” Enjolras says politely, settling into the worn fabric of the back seat and fiddling with the seatbelt. It's slack, stretched out too many times, and Enjolras scoots over behind the driver to find a belt that actually works.

With a quick glance over his right shoulder, the driver darts his little car out from the curb.

“Okay night?” he inquires conversationally.

“Yes, thanks,” Enjolras says. “I’m just leaving a meeting—we meet here every week, actually.”

“A meeting, you call it,” the driver chuckles, and Enjolras, who is sensitive when it comes to the ABC getting the respect it deserves, bristles a little before remembering that, of course, it's 12:30 in the morning and he's just gotten picked up from a bar.

“It's kind of a social activist group,” Enjolras explains. “It's not anyone's actual job, so we meet here because that way it's fun, too, sort of killing two birds with one stone, you know?”

“Socializing and social activism,” the driver says. “Socializing actively. What are your meetings about?”

“It depends?” Enjolras usually just talks to the drivers about their kids. No one has asked him about the ABC before, and it feels like kind of more of a conversation than they can fit in the remaining six blocks to his apartment.

“Depends on what?” the guy presses, making a left turn in the seconds before the arrow goes red. He looks back inquiringly in the rear-view, just long enough for Enjolras to get a startling view of clear, bright eyes below a heavy brow. He looks legitimately interested.

Enjolras is a sucker for real curiosity.

“Well, our world is fucked up!” he says, unwilling but not restrained. “There are so many terrible people doing terrible things. What _we_ do depends on who's doing the terrible things that we can maybe actually help fix. Like, let's see, in the last year, we've mostly focused on sex trafficking, coal pollution, living-wage laws, the repression of free speech by government surveillance, and the death of the neighborhood bookstore.”

“I don't think you can call five things a focus,” the guy says dryly, braking suddenly but not sharply for a drunken pedestrian. “Maybe a scatter-graph? A dispersal?”

Enjolras shakes his head. “If you heard how many ideas we float in our meetings, you'd be singing a different tune. Narrowing it down to those was the work of literally hours of negotiations and so many beers—I can't tell you how many beers.”

“Now you're singing _my_ tune. I didn't take you for much of a drinker.”

“I'm not. The beers are so everyone else can tolerate me.”

“You seem pretty tolerable to me.”

“Like, 85% of the ideas are mine,” he blurts. He grits his teeth. He doesn't usually admit this, not even to himself. His unquenchable enthusiasm is important—it's who he is, where all the best of him begins—but it's also embarrassingly childish to want so many things at once and depend on all your friends to be your only filter. “I maybe get carried away.”

“Ah,” the driver grins as if with recognition, looking back—over his right shoulder, this time, revealing a hard, rough-beaten profile that makes Enjolras think of cage fighters—before he pulls to the curb. “The mad savior, with the beautiful mind and the face of a catalog model.” _Really?_ Enjolras thinks, perturbed, but the man continues. “Anyway, here we are. Number 1832, right?”

 

**2**

The next week, he's surprised to see the same car pull up in front of the Musain. It's a warm night and the windows are down. The driver leans over before Enjolras can open the back, and calls through the open passenger window, “You can sit in front if you want. Or back is okay too, if that's...” but Enjolras is already folding himself into the cramped passenger seat.

“Oh shit, sorry, forgot to slide it back. Lever's right down there.” Enjolras adjusts the seat to accommodate his long legs and fiddles with the resistant shoulder-belt. “Sorry, again, most people ride in the back.”

“I thought you had to,” Enjolras says. “Most drivers tell me they're not allowed to take passengers up front.”

“Liars and charlatans,” the driver chuckles under his breath. “I know because I say it too. You know, a man's car is his castle and whatnot. You don't let just anyone up here.”

The front seat of this car is no more appealing than the back—dingy and faded, the peeling vinyl of the dashboard apparent even in the dim light of the streetlamp overhead.

“Then I’m honored,” Enjolras says.

“Oh, no, the honor is all mine,” the driver protests, leaving the curb behind. “It’s not every day my hansom hosts a true defender of liberty and justice such as you, sir. How goes the Active Socialism?” He tosses a quick wink sideways, his whole jagged face crinkling into it. “Did I get that right?”

“More or less,” smiles Enjolras, but the smile falls away when he remembers the night’s meeting. “We’re trying to decriminalize prostitution. We _need_ to decriminalize it, because then maybe law enforcement can start to differentiate between people _selling_ sex and people _being sold_ for sex, because while obviously the former is often problematic, the latter is just pure modern-day slavery; it’s exploitation; it’s abusive, and destructive, and it just really needs to end. _Now_.” Then his bombast falters a little: “We took a proposal to the city this week.”

“How’s that working out for you?” The question comes so straight that it takes Enjolras a second to realize it’s a jab.

“Um,” he winces. “Terribly.”

“Let me guess: The police are throwing a stompy fit about the wasteland of iniquity and scandal this city will become if we relent even a hair in our aggressive crackdown on crimes of the flesh.”

“They are such self-interested swine,” Enjolras bites out, frustrated, because Wednesday’s City Council meeting was an abominable miscarriage of justice that stings him in all of his deepest feelings.

“Probably with a dozen charts and studies and full-color analyses of crime data from comparable cities and a couple Scared Straight testimonials about how _six months in the slammer lifted the veils from my eyes and I cast off hustling and using and found the love of the good lord Jesus Christ, peace be upon him._ ”

“Yeah.” He stares at the driver for a moment, but the driver’s looking straight ahead at the road, giving nothing away. “That’s actually kind of uncannily _exactly_ what happened.”

Decelerating for a light, the driver grins at him. The smile is too wide, crammed with tall white teeth. He can’t look away from it.

“I’m at all the City Council meetings. I thought I recognized you in the car last week, and definitely saw you there this time.”

“ _Why?”_

“You’re very recognizable—you must know that. All that _hair_ , and the statuesque height, and the luminous eyes of an angel possessed, and all that.” He flips a hand dismissively. “You stand out.”

“No, why do you go to City Council meetings?”

“The expressions.” Enjolras’s face must convey that this makes no sense, because the driver continues. “It’s a good place to see people get mad.”

“Why would you want—”

“I draw,” he says. “I like to draw people, but I can’t afford life-drawing classes, and my friends get bored of posing, and drawing strangers in public makes you look like a pervert.”

“Are you good?”

“Sure.” He shrugs his shoulders, and Enjolras notices for the first time what he’s wearing—a loose plaid flannel shirt, rolled into sloppy cuffs that hang over the elbows. His forearms are thick and dark with hair, like smudges of charcoal, in the low light of the car’s interior.

“Can I see?”

“Sure. Glove box.”

Enjolras needs to force his legs into what may be hyperextension—he needs to ask Joly about that term, he notes, make sure he’s using it correctly—but gets the clunky glove compartment open. Inside, there’s a clear envelope of car documents and an artist’s notebook. Enjolras reaches for the overhead light. “May I?”

“You got it.”

The images are hasty sketches, rough and imprecise, drawn not for detail but for feeling. Each hurried figure behind the podium is there for a reason—you can see in the curve of the shoulder or the lift of the breast or even the turn of the foot whether they’ve come to this meeting out of indignation or rage or fear or—in a few cases, breaking up the visual encyclopedia of fury—something buoyant that looks a lot like hope.

“These are great,” Enjolras says, flipping, recognizing many of the other stalwart agitators in the sketched faces. He pauses on one—a tall man gesturing broadly with his arms in a movement that is so obviously Combeferre that the startling accuracy of the face and of the geometric tattoos that line those arms, while definitely impressive, isn’t really necessary; he could pick this guy out of a thousand men based on posture alone. “This is my best friend, actually.”

“No way.”

“Yeah. Wow. Could I, maybe, take a picture of it or something?”

“Oh, you can have it,” the driver says offhandedly, only now glancing down to see which picture Enjolras’s even talking about. “Yeah, you should take it. Those pages pull out easy.”

“You’re sure?”

“Sure.”

Enjolras is very careful pulling out the sheet of thin paper, which he tucks between the pages of his book so it won’t get wrinkled. Then he looks back at the sketchbook and catches his breath when he sees that the next picture is him.

This one’s a close-up, just his face, his hair a few evocative swirls, his lips twisted in bitter revulsion, eyes lifted skyward. He sees it all here, everything that fuels him—the anger, the terror of uselessness, the dream of a better day—plus something about the drawing seems to imply that maybe if those eyes were locked on you instead of the heavens, you’d explode in flames. He loves that implication.

“Take that one too,” the driver says, even though Enjolras hasn’t said anything, transfixed as he is by his own eyes. Determinedly not looking down from the road ahead, the driver still seems to know which image is rendering Enjolras wordless.

Enjolras blinks. “Whoa, thanks. Really?” he demurs. “I mean, I look kind of amazing here.”

“You ‘look _kind of_ amazing’?” The driver flashes sarcastic air quotes without letting go of the wheel. “Right. I thought you seemed smart, too.”

“Thanks.” Enjolras beams, a little dopily, maybe, at the angry seraph in his hands.

“No, I said _thought_ , dummy, as in past tense. I don’t care how fancy your day-job is, you’re not making prostitution legal in _our_ United States of Puritania.”

“Not _legal_ ,” Enjolras argues, stung by the shift in tone. “Just not _illegal_. And why the hell not?”

“Where do you think you are, you libertine? Amsterdam? We make whoring legal, next thing you know we’re selling dope behind the counter at Walgreens.”

“That’s a ridiculous progression... although our drug laws _are_ one of the worst travesties of a justice system in the modern era. Did you know that in our lifetimes, incarceration rates—”

The driver is holding a hand up. Stop. “Focus, daydream believer. You can’t make prostitution legal here. Or even ‘not illegal,’ if that’s what you want to call it. You’re shooting the moon, and all it takes is one prison-industrial cabal or old-school judge to shut you down. But what if you push on sentencing? To, like, amend the prostitution sentencing laws so that prostitutes get, like, rehab and job training instead of jail time? A lot of cities are doing it. You could make some charts of your own.”

“The idea’s come up,” Enjolras says reluctantly.

The driver nods curtly. “It doesn’t seem like enough?”

“Right.”

“Nothing’s ever going to be enough for your pretty utopia, is it?”

The question, while barbed, is gentle and feels honest. Enjolras looks down at his hands, at the sketchbook that’s still there, his own idealist’s face. He feels a stab of sorrow for the golden dreams that float behind those penciled eyes. _He_ knows his dreams, of course, but it’s surprising that a stranger could capture them so evocatively, and that that stranger knows—maybe better than he ever will—the limitations of a visionary’s sight.

Eventually, he just tells the truth: “No.”

The driver shrugs warmly at him, if you _can_ shrug warmly. “So why not do something that could work?”

Why not? It’s a good question. If he’s honest, it’s a question he gets asked a dozen times at every meeting of the ABC, but it sinks in differently right now. It doesn’t feel like an attack or a criticism—it feels like this guy’s looking out for him.

Outside, the night is still pleasant; a gentle breeze drifts through the car window. The car’s not moving anymore, and Enjolras realizes with a start that it’s because they’re idling outside his apartment building.

“Sorry!” he says, shaking himself. “I get lost in thought sometimes.”

“You don’t say.” He’s grinning around the sarcasm, shadowed lips plump and smooth against the scraggly stubble of his face. He’s not a good-looking man, Enjolras decides, not on the whole—but there’s something magnetic about him in parts, lush hair and brows, broken nose, over-full lips, pointed chin. And the _arms_ , hairy, strong, but somehow refined. The driver’s angular thumb scratches back and forth over the dimpled plastic of the steering wheel and Enjolras feels an odd tremor. Crap. He’s daydreaming again, _and_ staring, to boot.

“Sorry,” he says again. “It’s been a long day. Thanks, you were actually a really big help.”

The driver’s face seems to elongate, brows raising and lips pursing as if to question the _actually_ , but all he says is, “My pleasure, your excellency.”

“It’s Enjolras,” Enjolras says, extending a hand across the center console, because he has now seen what these hands can do, and he wants to touch.

“R,” the driver says. “Like the letter.”

 

**3**

“Hey, Zephyrus,” R says when his passenger is seated beside him again the next week. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course,” Enjolras says. “Yeah, go ahead.”

“I’m just curious, and maybe this is rude, but, you live like a ten-minute walk from here. Why the CarTel rides?”

Enjolras laughs, but he knows it comes out a little grim.

“Oh shit,” R continues. “I mean, um, you seem like you get around all right, but if you have, like, mobility issues, sorry, asshole question, pretend I never asked.”

“No, that’s not it,” Enjolras says. “That’s the exact argument I made when my friends forced me to register for CarTel. It’s ridiculous—I’m in good shape, I’m never actually _drunk_ when I leave, and it’s a very reasonable walk through an only vaguely dodgy section of town.”

“Your friends made you do it?”

“Yeah, they worry too much.”

“Worry about what?”

He hems for a moment, unsure whether he really wants to get this personal, then remembers the pictures R gave him and comes clean. “I got attacked one time a few months ago. It was when we were organizing the truckers at the port, and the smart money says the port administration hired the guys who got me.” He pauses, checking for a reaction, but R isn’t saying anything, just navigating the jittery late-night traffic and, apparently, listening. “I was a couple blocks from home, so they had to have followed me. They came out of nowhere, out of the shadows of a building, and I didn’t know what was happening until I was on the ground. One of them said something, while they were kicking me, something like _Back the fuck off if you know what’s good for you_ , and it’s one of those moments that just sticks with me, because before that, I was kind of sure they were just drunk bigots who were going to kill me.”

“Kill you for what?” R breaks in.

“For looking too gay?” He sees R’s hands tighten on the wheel. “It happens,” he says wryly, “even in our post- _Obergefell_ America. A lot. You must know that. But anyway, I was just so _relieved_ that I started laughing, like at the same time as I was probably screaming because they were still beating me and it hurt like hell, but I knew if the port had hired these goons, they were there to teach me a lesson, not kill me, and I wasn’t going to die. And I was right, they abandoned me cackling in agony in the middle of a street.”

“Holy fuck, man.” They’re stopped at a light, and R lifts his hand off the stick for a moment, as if to reach out for Enjolras, but quickly seems to think better, since he returns it to its post. “That is seriously fucked up.”

“I know, right?” Enjolras grins sheepishly. “So my friends said I needed to start getting rides home or they were all going to walk me there themselves, so I did the responsible thing.”

“Why not let them walk you?”

“I leave before one because that’s when _I’m_ done, not when the party’s over. And my friends, if you get them to your house, they don’t leave.” He feels compelled to add, “And anyway, as soon as I signed up with CarTel, I couldn’t figure out how I ever _didn’t_ have it. I use it basically every day now for work.”

“I know.” R’s eyes crinkle at the edges. “Your drivers rate you very highly.”

Enjolras shrugs in mock humility. He’s lived a lifetime of being rated very highly by people who barely know him, and he knows he’s a good person but also that those ratings are undergirded by racist and sexist beliefs about what _makes_ a good person, so he feels like it’s safest to avoid this conversation entirely. (Every now and then, he manages to dodge a controversial talk. Not enough, but not never.)

Instead, he gets flirty. “You too?”

“Yeah, me too, Legolas.” He winks, gesturing past Enjolras. “Your door.” And indeed, there it is, just outside, the dim yellow light of the entryway flickering through a tree’s leaves.

Enjolras wants to protest that Legolas has straight hair ( _we look nothing alike!_ ), but he just says, “Thanks.”

He doesn’t hear the car pull away until he’s upstairs and flipping the lights on in his apartment.

 

**4**

“Were you at City Council this week?” Enjolras inquires the following Saturday. “I didn’t see you anywhere.”

“I got there late. Long fare to the suburbs. From the airport, surprise early arrival home for her spouse’s birthday. She asked if I was cool with her changing in the back seat.”

“Were you?” Enjolras is horrified and fascinated by this risqué window into the CarTel-driver life.

“Oh, sure, most people don’t even ask. And she was pretty discreet. I think she was just putting on fancy underwear under the business suit. Or maybe taking it off?”

Enjolras considers ribbing him— _you didn’t check? (arched eyebrow)_ —but isn’t confident that this would go over well. “You mean to say that multiple people have changed clothes in the backseat of your car while you were driving them somewhere?”

“Uh, yeah,” he says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “Made out, too, and hurled, and a baby just about got born in here, but guess who knows the quickest route to every hospital in town?” He taps his temple. “I draw the line at the baby- _making_. I mean, if there’s interpersonal junk contact, that’s more than this old ride’s ready for.” He pats the wheel lovingly.

“So, by that logic, it would be okay with you if someone masturbated in here?”

R quirks a corner of his mouth, shifting into second. “Depends who’s asking? If, for example, I’m driving someone so overcome with the hot-blooded victory of his most recent City Council appearance that he cannot resist the call of self-sought relief, who am I to deny such a man the right?”

“You saw me?”

“Dost thou recognize thyself in the description?” R feigns surprise. “Then be my guest, sire; I shall avert mine eyes.”

Enjolras ignores the joke, because to not ignore it would mean actually allowing the idea of jacking off three feet from this guy to penetrate his mind, and—why did he think the word _penetrate_? does he hate himself? he wishes he were as good at suppressing blushes as he is at fighting off erections, because even in the dark, this is terrible—he is actually really non-sexually excited that R was there to see, because it was a fucking triumph and a half.

“Pretty sure the po-po left sobbing,” R muses after a minute’s awkward quiet, punctuated only by the clicking of a turn signal. “You iced them with your infographics.”

Enjolras hesitates for only a moment before he asks, “Did you draw any of the cops?”

“You bet your ass I did. Take a look.” He nods toward the glovebox, and Enjolras springs for the notebook.

Enjolras leaves the cab that night with two more sketches in hand—luminous and compassionate Cosette supporting her mother as Fantine tried to describe the emptiness of a life without options, and three sputtering police in the front of the gallery, obviously scrabbling for ways to gainsay the ABC’s faultless evidence. He’d almost asked to take a third, another of himself, this one somehow reminiscent of a victory statue—puffed chest, distant gaze—but that seemed greedy and vain, both at once, neither of which he wants the picture’s artist to know about him.

 

**5**

“Hey, R, I’ve got some friends with me tonight. This is Cosette and Marius, and I’m just going to cram them in the back, okay?” Enjolras is trying very hard not to sound excited about seeing R five weeks in a row now. This can’t be coincidence anymore, can it?

“Be my guest,” R says. He turns to shake hands with the lovers, who introduce themselves again very politely, but the second R’s putting the car in gear, Enjolras is sure that his friends have gone horizontal. This is just fine by Enjolras, because even with its finicky belt, the front seat feels more comfortable by the week.

R casts him a look. “New romance?”

“It’s been like a year,” Enjolras says despairingly. “But whenever they drink, it’s a full-on makeout session till someone falls asleep.”

“How do you know each other?

“Well, Cosette works with me... and Marius? Everyone Cosette’s ever met had heard about Marius within minutes of their first meeting.”

“What kind of work do you guys do?”

Enjolras groans inwardly. It’s so boring, so mundane. “I’m a safety inspector. For an engineering firm. Cosette’s an engineer there. But I’m mostly out of the office at job sites, making sure no one decides their hard hat is too itchy or that they don’t _really_ need to properly mark the locations of all the gas pipes before they dig.”

“Do you like it?”

“Not really.”

“Then why do you do it?”

He has to think about this for a moment. “It’s important, kind of? But mostly ’cause there’s lots of downtime in various breakrooms where I can work on ABC stuff.”

“ABC?”

“That’s my group. The Saturday-night group.”

“What does it stand for?”

“That depends who you ask. ‘Activists, Booze, Chitchat.’ ‘Anarchists Behaving Civilly.’ ‘Always Be Changing Shit, Preferably While Also Breaking Shit.’ That’s Bahorel’s. Basically, it was just a name we could agree on. God, we are so combative sometimes.” He shakes his head, thinking of that evening’s disagreements, which included a several-minute passive-aggressive ‘after you!’ battle between Courfeyrac and Jehan that had only ended when Cosette had come up for air long enough to call them a pair of fools and flip a coin, at which point it became apparent that both Courf and Jehan had completely forgotten what they had intended to say in the first place. “There’s like ten of us. The name alone took like three meetings.”

“Those guys fucking love you,” R declares.

“What? How do you know?”

“They give you every Saturday night, man. That’s more commitment than I’ve given my last three boyfriends.”

 _BOYFRIENDS???_ blares the marquee in Enjolras’s brain, but he manages to say, with surprising aplomb, “You should come sometime. You might like it.”

“Nah, thanks, but I’m an asshole in crowds.”

“You’re not at the City Council meetings.”

“Right, but only because I’m hiding in the back of the gallery. If I were like you guys, up front trying to change the world, I’d be such a pompous dick.”

“I’ve never thought you were any kind of dick.”

Is R _smirking_? This is fantastic. “I’m better one-on-one.”

“Do you like that about driving people around?”

“Sometimes. Talking of which, are these guys getting out with you?”

 _Oh crap._ Enjolras completely forgot about Cosette and Marius, who are moaning very softly from the backseat, and a glance out the window shows they’re almost at his own apartment. “Shit, sorry. Turn left at the light, okay? Cosette’s place is a couple miles east.”

“I could drop you off first if you want.”

“No, it’s cool.”

R looks dubious. “We’re like a block away. It’s going to mean I have to drive you all the way back.”

“Sorry,” Enjolras cringes. “I didn’t think. Do you need to be somewhere else?”

“Not at all, my knight-at-arms. Just, I’m not the one paying by the minute to be here.”

 _I would pay way more than whatever CarTel’s charging_ , Enjolras thinks, but says, “It’s cool. Maybe it’ll help make up for the tiny fares you usually get from me. You’ve kind of had crap luck there, huh? You’re getting assigned to me every week.”

He can’t help but note that R is grinning as he makes the left.

“Now you have to figure out what we’re going to talk about for the next twenty minutes.”

Enjolras laughs weakly, too thrilled at the words _twenty minutes_ to come up with much of a rejoinder. He lands on, “I’m not the one being paid by the minute to be here.”

R throws him a glare like a right hook. “My job is driving a car, Adonis,” he says, voice much milder than his glowering aspect, “not operating a 900 number.”

“Fuck, I’m sorry,” Enjolras stammers. “I didn’t mean that you, like, owe me anything. I was just trying to be funny.” The words fall like unripe fruit, clattering.

R studies him for a brief moment, looking quickly back to the road since they’re on a major thoroughfare now, and says, “I know.”

“But...” _you seem pretty sensitive about it_ , Enjolras thinks and doesn’t say, but he doesn’t need to.

It’s enough of a prompt for R. “You get a lot of shit in this game,” he explains. “Everyone thinks you’re theirs for the time it takes to get them from Origin to Destination. They make you listen to their shitty songs, tell you their fucking confessions, try to climb in your lap. One girl whispered taxi-driver-based bondage erotica from right behind me for twenty-five blocks of bottlenecks, and I’m pretty sure she tried to sneak a peek on the way out.”

“A peek?”

R casts an unsubtle glance toward the fly of his jeans, which is kind of a problem, because Enjolras follows the gaze a little too long and feels himself blushing again. “Uh,” he says, because his mind is a void but he should say something. “Did she leave satisfied?” This is an awful question. It makes him sound like such a creep, like he should be waggling his eyebrows while he asks. What is wrong with him?

But R grins. “I aim to please.” And oh fuck, now Enjolras is thinking about R with a hard-on, and this is an impossible situation to walk away from elegantly, or eloquently—the speech centers of his brain have apparently yielded full right-of-way to the clanging machine of his busy imagination.

Enjolras grasps desperately for a new thread of conversation. In his mind, R is leaning, naked, against one of the pillars at the back of the City Council chambers, and gazing reverently at Enjolras like he’s actually the warrior god R draws him to be, pencil dangling loose from his fingertips. _The signature?_ Enjolras thinks, landing on the only safe part of this image: the swashbucklingly bold letter scrawled in the corner of each sketch.

“You... you asked me about the ABC,” he prattles, any port in a storm. “What it means. So I think I get to ask you what R stands for.”

R grins, that increasingly-familiar flash of hard white teeth.

“Richard?” Enjolras tries. “Robert? Romulus? Robespierre?”

“That’s right,” R says, actually laughing now. “My parents were really concerned that I inherit their enthusiasm for the guillotine, so they named me Robespierre. No, _actually_ , it doesn’t start with R at all. It’s Grantaire.”

“Grantaire?” Enjolras repeats, and if he drops his voice a little lower and raspier than usual, who’s to say?

“Yeah.” Out of nowhere, Grantaire’s arm is off the stick shift, elbowing him lightly in the left bicep. “Don’t spread it around, okay? I need a little mystery.”

“I’m sorry,” Enjolras says, chagrined. “Do you want me to call you R still?”

“Stop apologizing, jerk. Remember how I said you don’t own me? What I tell you is my choice, and you can call me by my real name if you want.” He winks. “Especially if you do that thing with your voice again.”

Fuck fuck fuck, Enjolras is not made of stern enough stuff for this.

As the miles roll under the wheels, Enjolras sinks deeper into his snug seat and begins to contemplate the bliss that is being Grantaire’s passenger. R manages the car with such easy competence; Enjolras wonders, as Grantaire dissects his rambling accounts of the ABC’s early missions, whether this is how R looks when he draws, too. It’s hard to imagine this ungainly man hunched over a sketchbook—there’s something too brutish about him for that image to fit. But then again, taken in pieces, he looks too delicate to navigate the frenetic streets of a Saturday night downtown, and obviously he handles that with a forceful grace.

Cosette and Marius are both so smashed that Enjolras insists on seeing them safely into Cosette’s apartment. When he returns to the car, Grantaire’s got the overhead light on and has his sketchbook balanced on the steering wheel. Sadly, as Enjolras climbs in, Grantaire scrawls a quick initial in the corner and passes the sketchbook to Enjolras.

“Another one for you?” R offers.

“Oh, gross!” Enjolras exclaims instinctively when he sees the picture, laughing. It’s Cosette and Marius, framed by a rearview mirror, going at it. Cosette’s lips brush the upturned tip of Marius’s nose; he is kissing her chin. She’s on top of him, and it seems like it ought to be sexy, salacious, but it’s not—it’s a portrait of real love. “They’re going to flip for this. Can I give it to them?”

“If you think it won’t encourage them too much,” R says dryly, and then Enjolras has to tell the whole saccharine history because the only thing that tempers sweetness is dilution.

“Thanks again for all of this,” Enjolras says a good while later, when they’re approaching his apartment for a second time that night, with a gesture that he hopes encompasses the roundabout route and prying conversations and any other place he might have crossed a line, because Grantaire has apparently broken all of his filters.

“You got it,” Grantaire says. “You going to be at City Hall Wednesday?”

“Probably not,” Enjolras says with real regret. “This week’s entire agenda is community reaction to the proposal for a new shopping center by the old train depot.”

“Seems like you guys would be all over that,” Grantaire surmises. “Gentrification, big box stores, the unlivable minimum wage...”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” Enjolras says reluctantly, because he’s certainly railed about every one of these points in his efforts to convince the assembled ABC to oppose the shopping center, “but,” he groans, letting the stupid truths speak, “it’s also going to be a source of healthy food and hundreds of jobs in a food desert where unemployment routinely exceeds 50%.”

Grantaire nods, his lower lip jutting out in thought. “That’s very even-handed of you.”

“I _do_ listen to the others sometimes.”

“Oh right, the friends who save you from a death by a thousand social-justice causes.” Grantaire turns off the car under the broad-leafed tree near Enjolras’s door.

“Right.” Under scrutiny, R looks intrigued—intrigued _enough_ that Enjolras tries the hard sell again. “Really, you should come by next week. Meet them. I think you’d like it.”

“Saturday night’s when I get all the big fares,” Grantaire says, matter-of-fact, but with maybe just a little bit of hesitation? “Sorry, man, I guess I just don’t love you enough to forego surge pricing.”

 _Enough_? Good god. Enjolras’s insides are jumping. This has to be flirting, doesn’t it? You don’t say the words “love you” to someone if you don’t want them to think about you loving them, right? So he digs deep for the courage, grabs Grantaire by his muscled right forearm, and looks him in the eyes, a little too seriously on purpose so that it’s almost an act. (But they both know it’s not, right? This is so confusing. Why can’t all his drivers be harried older parents with a million complaints and a notable lack of jaw-defining stubble?) Enjolras swallows his nervousness at R’s surprised eyes on his own, his warm skin under Enjolras’s touch, and in his same ridiculous deeper register, murmurs, “Not yet.”

Before R can respond, Enjolras is fleeing the car, cheeks aflame and fingertips tingling.

As he fiddles with his keys at the front door, he’s pretty sure he hears Grantaire chuckling in the car, a soft, low rumble that unsettles the quiet night.

 

**6**

This week, Enjolras remembers that it takes two sharp tugs to loosen the shoulder belt in the passenger seat. Once the latch has clicked smartly shut, it’s time to face the music. It’s been a week spent reliving a single second: the give of Grantaire’s firm skin under his touch. _Was R yielding to him?_ he’d wondered, _or was it possible that he was actually drawing away? Would he be back next week?_ But here Grantaire is, picking him up, yes, but with a terse nod that Enjolras is afraid may mean R’s silently planning to move his business to the far side of town.

“Thanks for picking me up again,” Enjolras ventures. “I know it’s not much of a fare.”

Grantaire’s curls seethe as he shakes his head. _Too vehemently?_ Enjolras fears. Maybe he can just get out at the first stoplight, save them both the horror of the rest of this ride.

But traffic’s clear, the lights are in their favor, and they’re nearly to his apartment before Enjolras knows it, the heaviness of the silence crowding him closer to the door so he’ll be ready for immediate egress. When a light finally goes red, one block from home, Grantaire startles him by mumbling, “It’s not coincidence, you know.”

“What’s not?”

His head tosses again, impatient, storms on a black sea. “That I get assigned when you request a car.”

“How do you mean? Isn’t it just based on driver availability?”

“That and proximity.” He waits, brooding meaningfully, till Enjolras gets it.

“Don’t tell me you’ve been loitering by the Musain every Saturday night just so you can drive me a mile home.” _It’s the best time for big fares_ , he remembers.

“Okay.” R shrugs, his nose skewing further off-center with the wondrous, heartening return of that crooked smile. “I won’t.”

“How would that even work?” Enjolras continues, musing aloud, as they pull up to his building. “There must be dozens of CarTel calls an hour on this block.”

“The app pings you when someone wants a ride. But you can always decline. Hypothetically, of course.”

“Right, why would you decline? Especially when surge pricing’s in effect?”

“Right,” says R, studying his own hand on the wheel. “A fool’s move.”

This is so promising. Enjolras wants to throw his arms around Grantaire; he wants to tell him that fools often come in pairs; he wants to stuff R’s plaid shirt pockets full of twenties, make up for all the time R must have wasted waiting, but he thinks he knows the guy well enough now to know how that would go down. Instead, he taps very very lightly on Grantaire’s hand—the solid, graceful right hand that grips the stick shift—and says, “Thanks, R. See you next week?”

  
**7**

For a couple of reasons, Enjolras has rarely been this glad to see a car arrive.

First and foremost, because it wasn’t there last week. He’d done a double-take when the CarTel app told him to watch for a blue Prius; his driver had been a congenial older woman who talked the whole way about the vintage motorcycle she’s rebuilding. From the uneasy softness of the back seat, Enjolras had nodded politely whenever she checked the rearview. It’s been two whole weeks ( _a fortnight_ , he chuckles to himself, thinking that’s what R would say) since he’s seen Grantaire, and he’s been thinking about him enough to fill four.

And second, he’s so glad to see the grubby old Hyundai round the corner because it means he can get the fuck away from Montparnasse, a man of questionable employ who tends to loiter at the bar at the Musain, often with hands crawling over a seductively-attired date perched on the next barstool. On the nights Montparnasse is alone, his eyes hunt incessantly, frequently targeting members of the ABC. Tonight, Enjolras had the bad luck to leave the bar right as Montparnasse stepped out to smoke, and Montparnasse is pretty sure it’s serendipity. Enjolras has already pushed the groping hands away twice when the car pulls up to the curb.

Through the car window, he sees Grantaire’s long fingers tugging at the stubborn lock of the passenger door.

“Lemme come home with you,” Montparnasse slurs into his ear, breath a fog of liquor and tar. “You won’t regret it.” He slips a wiry arm around Enjolras’s waist, flat hand gripping his hip, as if they’re a foregone conclusion.

“Fuck off,” says Enjolras, and spins away, shoving Montparnasse hard. He thunks open the car door, which mercifully opens, and closes it fast behind him.

R takes off, for a moment just driving and letting Enjolras collect his breath. At the first light, he flicks a finger against Enjolras’s knee. “That guy giving you a hard time?” he asks mildly.

“Just a drunk asshole.”

“Okay.” Grantaire absorbs the gruff answer, seems to consider a change of topic, and then can’t let it go. (Enjolras doesn’t know how he’s already learned R’s face so well, but he has.) A muscle in the cheek twitches. “Anyone ever teach you to throw a punch?”

The question isn’t quite what Enjolras expected.

“Bahorel showed us all a few self-defense moves one time. But like half of them depend on you having an empty bottle within reach.”

Grantaire grins. “This guy sounds all right. But come on, man, you’re what? Twenty-five? Thirty?”

“Twenty-eight,” Enjolras says, not sure that he likes the overall trajectory of this conversation but very much in favor of Grantaire teasing personal details out of him.

“Twenty-eight.” Grantaire nods. “And you’re not puny. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to handle yourself.”

 _Not puny_ ? shrieks Enjolras’s indignant brain. “I will have you know that I am _well_ over six feet tall, and run three to five miles a day, and...”

“And get beat up by goons in dark alleys,” R finishes for him. Oh. This isn’t really about Montparnasse, is it? Enjolras feels a flush of warmth at the knowledge that R’s been stewing on the assault, worrying about him, but also a definite need to set matters straight.

“There were like four of them!”

“Armed?”

“I don’t know,” he admits. “I don’t think so?”

“You should know how to take care of yourself,” R reiterates.

“You going to teach me?” Enjolras demands. He sizes his driver up, realizing that in their handful of meetings, this man’s gone from being an odd assemblage of appealingly disparate parts to a full person. Hasn’t he always thought he looked like a fighter, though? “Is this, like, your wheelhouse?”

Grantaire’s shoulders lift in a familiar shrug. “Sure.” It’s the same response he got when he asked if Grantaire could draw, Enjolras recalls, and the drawings he’s tacked up over his desk seem like plenty of evidence of the understatement in a “sure” from Grantaire.

“What are you, like a street fighter on the side?”

“Nah,” Grantaire laughs, a quick glimmer of light reflecting off his teeth. “Grew up with martial arts classes, classic suburban-kid shit, jiu-jitsu, judo; high school wrestling team. A friend dragged me to her MMA gym a few years ago, so I did that for a hot minute.”

“Ew,” Enjolras says, curling his lip. “That’s the really gory fights, right?”

“Sometimes? Audiences love some punching. But the really cool wins are the technical ones—the fighters would rather beat their opponent with an arm bar, that’s basically a checkmate: tap out or you get your arm snapped.”

Enjolras is revolted and entranced. It seems like Grantaire can tell, because he pats Enjolras on the knee— _seriously_ , Enjolras marvels, because he is keeping count, _that’s twice this ride; touch me again and I’m going to pass out in your passenger seat_ —and says, “No one’s asking you to climb into the ring, sweet prince. There’s a lot of room between popping ligaments and whatever the shit that shove was back there. If that asshole wasn’t drunk off his ass, no way he’d’ve gone down that easy.”

“Maybe you just need to loiter closer,” Enjolras counters. “I had to wait a full two minutes for you tonight.” He wishes he could eat the words immediately—they sound so spoiled, so demanding, but at the same time, he really is a little stressed and (although he _knows_ it’s unfair) steamed about last week. “Where were you?”

R knows what he means. “My friend had a fight.”

“Oh no,” says Enjolras, immediately sympathetic, remembering the helplessness when he’d been attacked, the ripping and bruising under his skin, and how Combeferre and Joly had tended to him after. Of course you’d need Grantaire when you were hurt, if he was your friend.

“No, no,” Grantaire waves him off, pulling to the curb near Enjolras’s front door. “Not like that. The friend I mentioned, the cage-fighter. She got a last-minute chance to fill in for a sick fighter in a local title bout, and needed someone to stay with her siblings.”

“You’re a good friend,” Enjolras says, and while he still begrudges the absence, his appreciation is unforced. He looks at Grantaire and makes a mental note to ask about that broken nose sometime. “How’d she do?”

“Got creamed.” He grimaces. “Came home pulped, half-bruise. That girl doesn’t know when she’s pinned. But it’s cool, she’s survived worse.”

“Is she okay now?”

“Sure, a little ice and some whiskey fixed her up quick. She was training again by Thursday.” He’s looking right at Enjolras, looking him in the eye, which Enjolras realizes they haven’t done much. The brows bunch roughly in a quick frown, like he’s concentrating too hard to keep them in order. “Thanks for asking.”

“You worry about her,” Enjolras says, both because it’s obvious and because it doesn’t feel right to say _yes, you are welcome that I am showing the very most basic of concerns for your injured friend._

Instead of answering, Grantaire grips Enjolras by the jacketed shoulder. Like all their moments of contact, it’s fleeting—just long enough to register the solid weight of his hand—but it just feels right, like Enjolras’s been secretly waiting for this since the night they met.

Emboldened, Enjolras says what he’s wanted to for weeks: “I would really like to see you again.” And then, in case this is too ambiguous, considering that they see each other (almost) every single week, he adds, “In another context, you know?”

Grantaire pulls away, the hard planes of his face compressing. “Look, I _told_ you, I’m not coming to your meetings, man. Lovely though you may be, dear Paris, I have no time for your follies.”

Enjolras tries not to blow this up into anything more than disappointment, but he exits the cab crestfallen. He pauses with his hand on the door handle. A smarter person would nip the questions off here, save himself the continued let-downs, but he needs a hope of something to go on. “See you at City Hall, then?” he asks, hoping he doesn’t sound too desperate. “We’re having a rally first, out front.”

“I’ll try,” Grantaire nods around the rock-like set of his jaw. Maybe there’s something else he’s about to say; Enjolras registers this at the same moment as the door swings closed, but once it slams, it’s too late.

 

**8**

“Hey!” Grantaire hollers out the car’s window as he squeals to a stop in front of City Hall, and if Enjolras thought he’d never been so glad to see him as he had on Saturday, this is glad on another order of magnitude. Right before Grantaire catches his attention, Enjolras was scanning the streets for a taxi as he staggered down the slick marble steps, bowed down by his own injuries and the effort of supporting Combeferre, who seems to have absorbed the brunt of the damage—the damage that by all rights should have been _his_ , damn it—in the brawl.

They’d been caught unawares. Of course they’d expected another fight on the Port issue, but they’d been naive enough to hope that, in the plaza in front of City Hall, at least, this would be _metaphorical_ combat—a counter-rally, maybe, picket signs, free swag from the Port Authority—definitely not thugs strewn throughout the crowd who started heckling as soon as Enjolras and Combeferre took the podium.

And of course Enjolras had tried to assuage the dissenting voices, avert the threatened violence, not realizing yet that these assholes were probably the same ones who’d beaten him under a broken streetlamp months back, now being paid to start shit and see it through to its bloody end. Really, more than anyone else, Enjolras was trying to calm Bahorel, because from the first shouted taunt, he knew that Bahorel’s hands would be clenching into fists, so, searching out Bahorel’s eyes, he entreated his audience to keep the peace. _Please, friends, the public’s health deserves our reasoned discourse_. It worked until the first jerk threw something—a pair of pliers? he had marveled at the same time as the metal tool hurtled toward him over the crowd to split open his forehead—and through the first runnels of blood, he could see that Bahorel was already swinging. Then all hell broke loose.

Enjolras flees the scrum dragging his half-conscious best friend, who seems to be bleeding from everywhere at once. He’s on the stairs, looking for a cab and contemplating whether it’s worth waiting for one of the actual ambulances that he hears tearing toward the riot when, through some miracle, Grantaire has appeared at the very moment Enjolras needs him most.

He’s not sure how he manages to maneuver a very useless Combeferre into the back seat of the car, which is idling anxiously in a No-Stopping-Any-Time zone, but he does. He clambers in after his friend, kneeling on the floorboards so he can lean over Combeferre’s supine body.

“Thank god, Grantaire, I am so fucking glad to see you,” he says, not thinking about anything, just letting his mouth find some words while he frantically runs his hands over Combeferre’s injured legs, where the blood seems to gush rather than trickle. Combeferre is breathing hard through clenched teeth, obviously as an alternative to screaming at the pain. “Didn’t you say you always know the closest hospital?”

“I’ll have you to County General in five,” he promises. “Maybe less.” They’re already moving, fast, the night blurring past out the windows. “This is your best friend, right?”

“Right, I’m sorry,” Enjolras says, still on autopilot. “Grantaire, this is Combeferre. Combeferre, Grantaire.”

“Charmed,” says Grantaire. “How bad is he?”

“I don’t know,” Enjolras says, voice weak. “I got him out as soon as I could.”

“He bleeding?”

“Profusely,” Combeferre rasps, and to hear him is a jolt of relief mingled with horror at his mangled tone. “If I’m not mistaken, I’m on the way to what you might colloquially call ‘bleeding out.’” His limbs drape limply across the seat and floor, clothes stained in growing blotches.

“It’s everywhere,” Enjolras confirms, arms dark with his friend’s blood. “The fuckers stabbed him.” This sinks in suddenly, stirring a ferocious tumult of rage inside him. “They were armed, and they fucking stabbed him. Oh my god, this is my fucking fault, Grantaire, this is all my fault.” He might be yelling now. “They _told_ me to back off, and did I listen? They saw it wasn’t enough to hurt me, so instead...” he breaks off, the tears surfacing.

“Get it together, Enjolras,” Grantaire says, and Enjolras is startled into attention as much by the calm authority in his voice as by hearing Grantaire call him by his actual name. “Combeferre, we’re going to take care of you. Where’s the blood coming from?” He swings a hard right; a car’s horn blares behind them.

Enjolras fumbles to locate the rip he found a minute ago in Combeferre’s pants. “His thigh. Pretty high, kind of inside.”

“Femoral artery,” ’Ferre whispers, breathing more shallowly now.

“Fuck,” Grantaire says, low and deadly serious, and the pit of Enjolras’s stomach lurches. “Take off your sweater, Enjolras. _Now_. Fold it quick, and press it hard on the cut.”

Combeferre moans a little at the pressure on his leg. “That’s right,” Grantaire says reassuringly. “Hold it there. Push _hard_. Don’t let up.”

It’s quieter now, with Enjolras too focused on focusing his pressure to yell anymore. “’Ferre?” he asks, shrill and afraid. There’s no answer but the short gasps of Combeferre’s breath.

 _What the fuck have you done?_ Enjolras demands of himself. He is going to be so angry with himself when this is over, when Combeferre is unquestionably still alive and his own brain stops ricocheting.

“He’s going to be okay,” Grantaire says from behind him, accelerating. “You’re going to be okay, Combeferre. We’re almost to the hospital. They’re going to fix you right up.” He pauses. “Are _you_ okay, Enjolras? You’re breathing funny.”

Enjolras’s breathing hard because he’s terrified, that’s all, and everything looks like black blood and white streetlights and he is not going to remove his hands; he will _not_ fail Combeferre a second time.

“Two blocks,” Grantaire says. “You’re doing great.” Enjolras doesn’t answer, and Grantaire keeps going, his disjointed patter filling the hollow space in Enjolras’s confused brain. “You know, I kept meaning to ask what you ended up doing about the whole Port thing. Guess you didn’t let them scare you, huh? That’s some high romance, there, dude—very George Gordon, Lord Byron. ‘Battle for freedom wherever you can,’ right?... This one’s on me, by the way. You can still tip if you’re feeling generous. Or update your rating to reflect my service as an ambulance driver. That was a goddamned speedy car retrieval I did for you when that fight started, I tell you what. Oh, fuck, I forgot all about the blood towels in the trunk. Why carry blood towels, even, if you’re not even going to pull them out when you need them? ... Man, I bet your Good Deeds Society gives blood six times a year. The hospital probably owes you guys so big, you could pump your friend full of Type O and still have enough credit to score him some bonus kidneys while he’s here, just in case he grows up to need them.”

Grantaire swerves to a halt, and his tone does a 180, from flighty to matter-of-fact. “We’re at Emergency parking. Just hold it together for another minute, man. Let’s get him inside.”

Enjolras doesn’t know how he can maintain pressure and open the door at the same time, so he maintains pressure. Grantaire told him not to let up, and he will not, not till someone else takes over.

The door creaks open behind him, a warm hand pressing above his on the wadded, bloody sweater. “I’ve got him,” Grantaire says from very near Enjolras’s ear. Enjolras can feel his body leaning in through the open door, arched over Combeferre, toward him. “Can you squeeze out and find us a stretcher?”

Enjolras wriggles his hands from below Grantaire’s dependable fingers, which maintain pressure on the wound. Combeferre is still breathing in shallow puffs, but he is _still breathing_ , and the blood no longer seems to be gushing forth.

Grantaire’s other hand finds his to guide him out. It grounds him. “He’s going to be okay, Enjolras. He really is.” Enjolras lets the hand pull him across the floorboards to the door. “I’m going to come in with you guys, okay?”

“Why did you come to the rally?” Enjolras asks, and it’s really not the time, but it’s the question in his head, which is buzzing at the movement and the bright lights of the hospital entry across the broad concrete courtyard. He’s standing now, pinned between Grantaire’s hip and the inside of the open car door, but for some reason, they are still holding hands. Enjolras isn’t asking _any_ questions about that. “I thought you didn't believe in our causes."

"I don't,” Grantaire laughs briefly, still leaning over Combeferre. “All _my_ causes are people."

Enjolras feels a little faint at that thought. Maybe Grantaire does, too, he thinks, noting that Grantaire, who is tilting his head up to look Enjolras in the face for the first time since they left City Hall, is suddenly going pale. He stares back. There is something here, he knows. He feels it in the depths of his bruised, tight muscles. Grantaire looks so stunned, his crooked face clear as an etching in the stark white lights of the hospital entrance. He is going to say something.

But what he says, that raw voice probing into him, is definitely not high romance: “Holy fuck, Enjolras, what the fuck happened to your face?”

“I...” and he lets go to rub his eyes, struggling to recall precisely. Every part of his face feels sticky and tender. “I got hit by a thing. Maybe several things? And the podium, I’m pretty sure someone knocked me into the podium?” He shakes his head, which is a mistake—a madhouse of strobing light. “Which way for the stretcher?”

“Right there,” Grantaire nods backward toward the main doors.

Enjolras takes a step away from the car and his knees buckle.

“You okay?” Grantaire asks, tone oddly sharp, and he is bent so strangely, one arm deep in the car stanching the flow of Combeferre’s blood, the other reaching out for Enjolras, who stumbles backward, toward him.

He is dimly aware of Grantaire’s strong arm around his ribs, Grantaire’s booming voice echoing in his head: “Fuck! Help! Please, someone! Help!”

 

**9**

On the curb outside the Musain, Enjolras is antsy. He sees that Grantaire has claimed his ride request, but the old Hyundai hasn’t rounded the corner yet.

The night’s meeting was a strange mix of depressing and jubilant, he thinks—Musichetta and Joly, who had both missed Wednesday’s City Council rally and melee because of work, bought everyone’s drinks, and Marius gave a touching and teary speech about how this group was his family now and they’d better not get themselves killed out there, and when the others started congratulating themselves on the ABC’s superhuman ability to foment dissent, Enjolras banged the table with his fist (wincing at the pain the noise sparked in his still-tender skull) and rose to remind everyone (in a tone that, if slightly less strident than usual, still compelled the head and the heart) that the fight isn’t over, that the Port will continue to fight dirty, that every day until new clean-air regulations passes is another day children growing up near the port will continue to develop life-threatening asthma at rates nine times the city average.

Combeferre sat coolly at his side, bandaged leg propped on a chair. He was still a little low on energy from the blood loss and painkillers, but he was okay. When Enjolras noticed that Combeferre was leaned back and nodding during this latter speech, smiling the little winking smile that always meant they were on the same page, he felt his ribcage swell in love and relief.

No one else was as badly injured. Most sustained a few bruises. Cosette did dislocate a finger yanking a projectile from someone’s hand, but that finger was always getting dislocated, ever since her point-guard days in high school, and she was not troubled—more concerned in the moment about the nasty gash over Courfeyrac’s ear from a hunk of metal similar to the one she’d ripped away from the would-be assailant. Bahorel broke a few bones in his wrist, but waited to go to the hospital till yesterday, when his favorite orthopedic surgeon was on duty; while there, he happened to encounter Bossuet, who had escaped the City Hall kerfuffle with mere scratches only to crush his hand in a freak revolving-door accident on his way in to work yesterday morning.

 _Everyone is okay_ , Enjolras reminds himself, waiting for Grantaire. _So why am I so anxious?_ He paces the curb. Grantaire accompanied him and ’Ferre into the hospital, the nurse told him, and loitered outside the room till Enjolras came to. But Enjolras doesn’t remember seeing him there. He hasn’t seen him since that look next to the car, seconds before he passed out, when Grantaire, who was busy keeping Enjolras’s best friend alive, seemed to also be saying he believes in Enjolras, that Enjolras might be (become? who fucking cares? possibility is what matters here) one of the causes of his life.

The thought still makes Enjolras giddy. He takes a deep breath, finally seeing the beat-up silver car. He needs to talk about this, he thinks. He _will_ talk about this, now, tonight.

But when he gets into the car, Grantaire speaks first.

“How have you not been fired?” he demands.

Enjolras is taken aback, but it’s a question he’s asked himself at at least a few junctures in his history as a leisure-time activist. “I think I’m just lucky enough to have an employer that doesn’t meddle in its employees’ personal doings. It’s true that several of our causes have skated awfully close to conflicts of interest, which might lead a more conservative place of business to—”

“No, I’m not talking about politics,” R cuts him off, sounding frustrated, one hand lifting from the wheel to shove a flapping shirt-cuff angrily back toward his elbow. Unabashed, Enjolras watches the muscles of Grantaire’s forearm tense under the haze of dark hairs.  “I _mean_ , how the fuck have you not been fired as a safety inspector when you are so obviously total shit at assessing risk?”

Oh. This makes more sense. “I’m sorry. You didn’t have to do that, you know, taking me and  ’Ferre to the hospital.”

“I know I didn’t have to, asshole,” he says belligerently. “I fucking _offered_.” He glowers at a couple of club-goers crossing the street in front of them, and when he keeps talking, it’s quieter—a stream of muttered reflection. “I came to the rally, you know. I was in the back, though, and I couldn’t see it. I saw the first guy fling whatever-it-was, but I didn’t see it hit you, there were so many people all of a sudden yelling and pushing each other. And then someone was yelling, ‘He needs help! He’s bleeding!’ and the only thing I could think was I had to get you out of there, so I ran to bring my car around. I was going to carry you out over my shoulder if I had to.”

“But instead...”

“You were dragging your friend out, and as soon as you got close enough that I could see _you_ were the guy doing the rescuing, well... well, it was a goddamned fucking relief. You are not motherfucking _Atlas_ , pretty boy. It’s not on you to carry the heavens on your shoulders.”

“I wasn’t trying to,” Enjolras protests, his mind tumultuous with Grantaire’s relief and anger. “All I was carrying was Combeferre.”

“Collateral damage from when the celestial spheres crash off your back.” Grantaire’s side of the car radiates a blurry halo of rage and dejection. “You can’t fucking fix it all, man.”

“No,” Enjolras agrees slowly. “And sometimes people get hurt when I try. But sometimes we make things better. I’m not a complete idiot, Grantaire; I knew Wednesday’s rally was risky. All of us did. But the thing is, for every one of us in the ABC, the risk is worth it. That’s who we are.”

“The avenging angels,” Grantaire snarls, staring ahead. Enjolras thinks regretfully that he hasn’t seen R’s eyes once this ride, and they’re already pulling to a stop in front of his apartment building. “This is why I’m not one of you.”

“Is that why you left me? At the hospital?” Ask him if he cares how petulant he sounds.

“Yes. No. I waited to see... to see you come back. And then I went to make sure Combeferre was all right, and that they’d tell you he was okay, and call your people. And then, I was just...,” R breaks off, glaring at the road. “It was too much.”

“You didn’t stress this much about your friend,” Enjolras accuses, because he will _not_ let this conversation die before they talk about how much transpired inside them in that long, bloody minute when they were holding hands in front of the hospital.

“My friend?”

“The boxer?”

“Oh,” he says, mulling it over. “Yeah, but no one was going to kill her. And anyway, Éponine doesn’t want people to worry. She’s as tough as a one-eared cat.”

Enjolras tries not to look hurt by this implied slight, but the affront must show somewhere, because Grantaire looks away from him to bang his head lightly on the steering wheel.

“Look,” Grantaire says, in a small voice that suggests he’s cutting through the bullshit. “I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

This is probably as good an opening as Enjolras’s going to get.

“ _You_ look,” he says back. “You said people are your causes. If you’re going to let me be one of those causes, it’s going to be your job to save me sometimes.”

And, glory be, Grantaire looks up. His eyes gleam in the dark. His upper lip quirks. “You want to be my cause?”

“Um, yeah?” Obviously. Who wouldn’t want those flannel shoulders backing them up?

R nods. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“You’re already my cause, princeling. From your first ride, when I realized you were the crazy guy who preaches earthly justice at City Council, I was ready to save you from whatever you bring upon yourself. Even if it costs me, I don’t know, surge fares? enormous parking tickets? copious amounts of blood in the back seat?” He smiles—how do all those perfect teeth fit in there?—and Enjolras is done with talking.

“Can I kiss you?” he asks, leaning over the center console, fairly sure of the answer.

Grantaire recoils. “What?”

Fuck. Enjolras scrambles back upright, trying not to skeeve Grantaire out any worse. “I’m sorry. Maybe I read this wrong. I thought... well... we held hands? and you worry about me? and you park in No Stopping zones on my behalf? I thought you maybe wanted what I want. And that’s, like, kissing. For starters.”

“Oh shit.” Grantaire is wide-eyed, pressed against the door. It’s hard to tell how much of this he took in. “You’re probably still concussed, Enjolras. Yeah, I flirt with you, but we both know that’s only because it’s jokes, because guys like you don’t go out with guys like me. You _know_ that, when your brain’s not all bruised.”

“Guys like me?” Enjolras is perplexed.

“If you’re the goddamned golden knight in this story, man, I can be your page. Maybe if I work really hard, I’ll make squire. But we’re not on the same tier, hierarchically-speaking. Think what we each bring to this earth. It’s no contest.”

“I _am_ thinking about it,” Enjolras says, exasperated, because how can Grantaire not know this? He’s thinking of R’s control Wednesday night, how his calm knowledge and quick driving probably kept Combeferre, and by extension, Enjolras—for whom a life without ’Ferre is like a life without solid land under his feet—alive; he’s thinking of the dozens of ways R already challenges him, rebuts him, pushes him to find the real in his ideals; and he’s even thinking of the drawings in his bedroom, of how many times in the last month he’s longed to know whether the artist does self-portraits. “And it’s no contest, but only because I concede. I don’t want to compete with you. I think you’re great.”

Grantaire is shaking his head, the inky swirls of hair waving around him. It looks like he’s trying to blot himself out.

“Pretend you believe me,” Enjolras entreats, his heart straining against Grantaire’s obliviousness. “What would you do? If you could believe that I like you?”

“If I could believe it...?” It was the right thing to say. Grantaire’s face shifts, from trapped animal to something sly, knowing, cocky. It’s such a sudden transformation that Enjolras gulps, a little nervous about what _this_ Grantaire is going to do.

And what he does is so small and simple and perfect: he rests his ready hand, palm-up, on the plastic of the center console. When Enjolras fits his own hand on top, his fingers finding a place among Grantaire’s, he thinks, _I am going to convince you of this or die trying._

The convincing starts with kissing. It’s slow and then fast, interrupted by odd bursts of laughter and sounds of surprise—Enjolras can’t stop laughing at how much it excites him to touch R’s arms (the flannel-covered bits and the hairy, exposed ones, all of them make him want to take this man to bed immediately, damn convention); Grantaire chuckles when he discovers Enjolras’s tragus piercings, and then his tongue is all over one of them, and Enjolras is a moaning pile of mush.

He manages a few words: “Can you come in?”

Grantaire pulls back just a little. “Like, now?”

“Oh, fuck, I’m so sorry. You’re working. I’m so—”

“You really need to get this apologizing tic under control,” he says, but he says it with those thick soft lips burring against Enjolras’s skin. “I make my hours. I’m not working now.”

“Oh.” Enjolras feels too excited to care that he also feels stupid as hell.

“But do you really want me to?”

“Of course I do, Grantaire. You need to believe me. I am very serious about you.”

Grantaire laughs, a hard huff of air against Enjolras’s cheek. “As serious as you may be, some might argue that this is a bit soon to bring a fellow home.”

“Oh shit.” It’s true that Enjolras tends to rush things. He is not famed for his patience. “I’m sorry, what was I thinking? God, you’re right. There’s so much I don’t know about you.”

Grantaire pulls further back, eyebrows lifting quizzically. “Such as?”

“I mean, I’ve never even seen your legs!” This may be the stupidest example he could possibly give, but it is literally the only one available for his use in his scrambled brain.

Grantaire smirks at him, and even if it’s buoyed by fake confidence, Enjolras is crazy for that smirk. “Is that a prerequisite for you? If my humble word will suffice, I can assure you that they’re pretty good. My finest feature, some say—but that may be a ‘faint praise’ situation.”

Grantaire’s flippant self-criticism scissors into Enjolras. “That’s not what I meant!” he says. “I just—you’re right, I don’t know you. You’ve given me, what, a dozen rides now?”

“Nine,” Grantaire corrects, “If you count this one.”

“I definitely count this one.” He counts this one the most. The last few minutes alone count for maybe a hundred rides.

“Figured as much,” Grantaire says, tapping the side of his head how he does when he thinks he gets something better than you do. “Want to see my legs?”

“Um.” Enjolras is horrified, frozen wide-eyed at the thought, because what if Grantaire took him so literally that he’s going to drop trou here in the car, what the fuck kind of controlling asshole does that mean he thinks Enjolras is?, but if he _is_ going to show any glimpses of what Enjolras can only imagine are thick, sturdy, shaggy-furred legs, Enjolras is certainly not about to look away.

All Grantaire’s teeth smile into Enjolras’s petrified face. “Not quite the reaction I expected, but I’ll take it for a yes.” Then he gets out of the car.

What?

Through Grantaire’s window, Enjolras sees Grantaire’s long arms lock behind his back in a languid stretch. Then he’s walking around the car, his hand on Enjolras’s door handle, and then the car door’s open and Grantaire is a whole person, a person who exists outside of a car, a person Enjolras could meet on the street and find fearsomely attractive.

“I don’t know why you’re so attractive to me,” Enjolras says to the man holding his car door open, and again, this seems like a shitty thing to say, but it’s honest, and he thinks Grantaire will appreciate that.

“Me either,” Grantaire shrugs, offering him a hand up, “But I’m not asking any more questions.”

So Enjolras takes him home.

 


End file.
